Farewell to the Mask: The Art of Liu Qi

Liu Qi’s paintings are like the man himself: forceful and direct. Concern for society, personal anguish, flashes of insight—these inner elements, still unreconciled, surge forth in a discontinuous language. This is particularly apparent in his recent works. There, it is as though some mechanism has been set in motion: a sleeping lion leaps up, roaring wildly. The stark black and white suggest a mythic lion unfurling its white mane against the night.

Liu Qi likes to call his work “conceptualized art,” and greatly admires Picasso’s statement that “art has not changed; people’s ideas have changed.” This certainly reflects his understanding of art history, but I feel that—especially recently—passion has engulfed his pictures still more fully. The inner turmoil surging from every direction repeatedly leaves him little time to select and sift his formal language according to so-called “standards of beauty.” He needs to express himself, just as in life he insists on speaking, without much concern for whether others understand or accept what he says. Once he returns to his lonely little room on the plateau, with no one in whom to confide, canvas and paint become his most natural means of expression. Recent titles such as Night of October 26, 1996 offer some indication of this. Perhaps, measured against the scope of the painting itself, this title cannot encompass all it contains; it seems merely to specify when work began. In fact, it does more than that. The painting’s language resides in the traces of spontaneously surging emotion, recording a particular state of body and mind that occurred only on that night. This brings Pollock to mind: each action is a visible record of psychic automatism. Although the manner of acting and the final results display a stylistic unity from one work to the next, each painting is highly autonomous, since the state from which that psychic automatism springs cannot be the same every time.

This may be seen as a precondition of his artistic existence: a mixture of passion and ideas makes a forceful incursion into the picture in a state of intuition. It is direct, independent of conventional narrative expression. Yet it belongs to an ancient subject: sincerity—fidelity to the life of the inner self and to one’s awareness of the world. In this sense, it is also absolutely realist.

The recent black-and-white works Night of October 26, 1996, White and Black develop this candid language of self-portrayal to the fullest. The latter two paintings also constitute the Mask Series. White might be seen as the outward resolution of Black. The latter, charged with explosive motion, resembles a mask suddenly torn open. Unrelated images of inner states drift there, fearful and ambiguous. Some are about to sink into deeper darkness; some hesitate in a gray zone between light and dark; some resemble hair bursting outward, bearing directly down on the viewer. In White, the frenzy and agitation finally acquire structure, gathering into a silent mask that once again assumes a polite posture, holding this unfamiliar world at a distance.

These works show that a direct language does more than serve the world of passion: it can also engage subjects of greater gravity. The artist’s whole attitude toward the world finds expression here. The “mask” is the concrete form through which people of different identities exist in the social sphere; without masks, people can scarcely go on living. Yet however finely made a mask may be, it cannot conceal its flaws, and expressive color will force those flaws into view. Seen from a somewhat cynical standpoint, no one’s mask withstands scrutiny, just as a face turned to the light implies another turned to the dark. In an instant, the mask seems to split open. The opening grows larger and larger; an endless clamor tears and surges outward, its irresistible energy disrupting what we take to be the order of our lives.

Yet the thoughts and feelings the artist pours into his paintings are not so metaphysical from the outset. Perhaps, at some initial moment, he looked at himself and saw only a familiar mask. Suddenly uneasy, he felt an inner wave of heat rapidly gathering, burning the mask. Then the collisions and displacements of black and white beneath it lay exposed before him. They were so unfamiliar that even he was startled, and the desire to free himself from this disturbing strangeness led him to paint. As the mask and the entire process of its gathering and disintegration gradually became objects of representation, they also converged with a certain idea of the world: the pervasive social mask. Seen in this way, his process of painting is also the process by which an idea takes shape. Painting and the creation of ideas proceed together, at the same time dissolving the hardness of the idea as an abstract concept. The idea is also passion, the trace of action and a pictorial configuration taking shape in its outward unfolding.

Tearing the mask, as a farewell ritual, heralds a new stage in the artist’s career. Of course, this stage has only just begun; continually bidding farewell to the past appears in his work as an enduring action. Before this, he had already undergone a farewell that seemed to have been completed, embodied in his solo exhibition at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in June 1995, titled Views on Lightness and Weight — (Out) Radon and Tritium (In). The title itself is a pair of contradictions: lightness and weight, departure and entry. It faithfully expresses his assessment of the human historical condition. For people in general, although actively changing oneself is often difficult, one is nevertheless changed passively as history unfolds. The artist, by contrast, must bring the initiative to change into every corner of his own life. Yet art’s historical circumstances and the surrounding environment do not allow that change to occur decisively. The part of the self against which he struggles consequently becomes more powerful. Thus, despite the distinction between active and passive change, in the awkwardness of his predicament he is no different from anyone else at any point in history.

The Group Portraits for Remembrance series shown in (Out) Radon and Tritium (In) may offer the most fitting condensation of this farewell’s meaning. Comic self-satisfaction appears on the figures’ reddish-brown faces, yet their striking monotony also makes them resemble masks, conveying a pervasive blankness. The pale clothes accumulate in folds. They scarcely seem to be worn on bodies at all, but rather draped over dry, rigid coat hangers. All this hints at the earlier, harrowing battle of farewell—the contest between entry and departure. In the end, however, a departure has been made. As in a pause during an adventure, everything has grown calm. Energy has been drained away, and bodies gradually emerge from the background to the surface. Yet the background is so compressed that there is no space to re-enter. Placed in the foreground, what can these figures do but begin another farewell?

The documentary significance of Group Portraits for Remembrance is evident. Although it is largely personal documentation, it also establishes a distance from the collective documentary character of the “New Generation.” It can almost be read as a foreshadowing of the recent act of tearing masks. At the same time, it may be a mask that has closed up again, containing the painter’s humor at the end of a period. A similar feeling appears in another series shown in that exhibition, Eating, which adopts a pictorial configuration similar to the former. Here, however, the faces and hands built up with rounded brushstrokes reveal two opposing vectors. On the one hand, their structure is solid; on the other, that structure resembles foam swollen with air, always liable to disperse and collapse. Perhaps this symbolically makes remaining in place impossible, carrying the same meaning as the flat plane behind the figures.

In fact, at least up to now, Liu Qi’s work has unfolded as a perpetual farewell ritual that refuses to remain in place. We should therefore not be surprised that his works, even within a single exhibition, encompass so many stylistic manifestations. This does not mean there is no consistent underlying direction. Even considered solely at the level of motifs, each passing surge of passion and flash of inspiration is threaded through his compassionate questioning of the human condition. One might even say that it contains an incisive cultural critique. At the same time, the inclusiveness of his pictorial language reveals his delight in, and heartfelt admiration for, the visual vocabularies that have continually proliferated, especially in our century. Again and again, he exercises his power to make his own artistic choices, because he refuses to close himself off. For him, there is no reason not to use any language capable of expressing the self. His entire life in art, like each act of painting, is an action, a farewell and a true act of self-transcendence.